A Defense

One Baha'i's Apologia

By John Taylor; 2009 May 15, Jamal 18, 166 BE

One of the duties that Baha'u'llah puts on shoulder of every believer is the obligation to defend His Cause. So although I am not a member of the Institution of the Learned, I will in my own perhaps idiosyncratic way attempt an apologia against those who would bully my brothers and sisters in the Faith. Today it was called to my attention that there is an entire, "Anti-Baha'i section at Tehran Book Fair,"

"A section in the 22nd Tehran International Book Fair is devoted to displaying books against the Baha'i Faith. This section is organized by a group called Bahai-pashuhi [Baha'i-Research]. They have created a clever website in form of neutral and friendly commentary which is designed to attract Baha'is. The effort is funded by the Qom seminary which has had a number of publications against the Baha'is and held various lectures and seminars on the same subject." (http://docstalk.blogspot.com/2009/05/iran-early-bird-may-14.html)

Unlike the Christian anti-Baha'i site "Bahaitruth," which plays relatively fairly and does not stoop to outright calumny and deception, such does not seem to be the case with opponents of Baha'i in the Cradle of the Faith.

Before I became a Baha'i at age 17, I was a visceral, rabidly anti-theistic atheist. At that time whenever I heard a Christian fanatic open their mouth my skin would crawl and I felt like I was taking an acid bath in hypocrisy. I do not know what sort of revulsion I would have felt had I come across that anti-Baha'i section of the Teheran book fair. How can one's faith become so corrupt that even telling the truth no longer matters? If fanaticism is an acidic form of hypocrisy, then there is no image, no feeling, no word for such a lack of scruples. Hypocrisy squared? Hypocrisy to the n-th degree?

And now I read that the latest accusation against the imprisoned Baha'is in Iran is, get this, "corruption!" Moojan Momen writes in New Statesman:

"In recent days, however, a report from the Baha'is UN office indicates that another charge is being levelled against the seven prisoners; that of spreading corruption on earth. To the Western reader, such an accusation may seem to be a confusing or even nebulous basis for criminal charges. But in theocratic Iran it has a basis in the penal code and leaves the accused in an extremely vulnerable position. The term, found in the Koran, has increasingly been used within Islamic legal practice to brand any undesirable "offender": Muslims considered to be too lax in their practices; those who are considered socially evil, such as drug-traffickers and prostitutes; or those with whom the authorities have a fundamental theological disagreement, such as the Baha'is." (http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2009/05/roxana-saberi-baha-iran-tehran)

I could not let this pass, so I looked up the reference for corruption of the earth in the Qur'an. In it Muhammad is addressing the accusers and, yes, calumniators, who had attacked Him verbally. Here it is:

"Or do they say, "He is possessed"? Nay, he has brought them the Truth, but most of them hate the Truth. If the Truth had been in accord with their desires, truly the heavens and the earth, and all beings therein would have been in confusion and corruption! Nay, We have sent them their admonition, but they turn away from their admonition." (Qur'an 23:70-71, Yusuf Ali, tr.)

So, let me take the meaning of this in. The cause of corruption is hatred for the truth. The opponents and persecutors of Muhammad, or "most of them," hated truth. This is not mere error, delusion or advocacy of a wrong cause, it goes far deeper. Hating the truth is very close to what Jesus said is the only unforgivable sin: hating the Holy Ghost. God is love, and if you hate God, you hate love itself, making you as far as one can imagine from either love or truth. Forgiveness is out of the question because that narrow soul does not even believe in justice. How can even God save such a benighted troll?

The holy words of the Qur'an go further, suggesting a thought experiment. Imagine what the world would be like if a genii came down and put the world into their hands. The result, God says, would be "confusion and corruption." Again, this is similar to Christ's "ye shall know them by their fruits."

Last night a friend posed a similar thought experiment at our Philosopher's Cafe meeting. A lapsed Christian, he asked us to imagine a believer standing on a sidewalk. A stranger walks onto the road and is about to be killed by a bus. Christian doctrine promises that if he is a hero and saves the victim, but is killed while doing so, he will be doing a pure deed and get an automatic ticket into heaven when he enters the next life. In this scenario, Satan stops everything and tells the believer that the victim is too far away, that there is no way he could reach him in time.

"However, if you want, I will allow you to do make it. I will squeeze space and time so that you can save the guy, be martyred and get your ticket to heaven. All I ask is that you give me your eternal soul."

My friend then posed the kicker: if the guy accepts the deal and goes to hell in order to save the accident victim, is he not doing a more meritorious deed than if he had done it in order to get into heaven? We had to agree that he would.

I objected that you cannot artificially separate personal from collective salvation in this way. It is like cutting off the branch of a tree and then asking if it is a perfect branch. It may have been perfect before but as soon as you cut it off you killed it. Dead branches are far from perfect, they are not even part of the tree. There is no way to separate "me" as an individual from "me" as a member of society and make calculations from there. At the heart of religion is the fact that we know nothing. We can never be sure of whether any act will be pure or impure, end in good or evil, or anything. Our utter ignorance invalidates the whole experiment.

So my friend redefined the experiment. Imagine a perfect, saintly Pope. Satan comes to him and says, I will cure every AIDS case in the world and save millions of lives if you will sign away your soul. Again, if he signs Satan's contract in order to save those lives, he gives up heaven for hell. Thus he will be doing an even better good act than if he had done it just in order to get into heaven. To take on evil for good surely is purer and more selfless than to do good for good.

My answer was this: That is why Jesus went into the wilderness and was tempted thrice by Satan in just this way. This experiment came as soon as His mission had started. Satan offered him the three big human motivators, power, glory and security. He refused. For one thing, Satan by definition is a liar, only God has in His hands the power, glory and salvation that was offered. Nothing comes of an untruth.

Another reason, as Jesus says to Satan, is that only God has the right to test His creatures. We do not test Him, or presume to experiment with Him. Our knowledge of God is expressed in passive reflection of His image and action based on His example. This is not the sort of knowledge you can grasp, dominate and use to change the foundations of the world. That would be science. The ignorant cannot control the Knower, the Truth, so this is mere superstition. By offering that lesson at the very start, the Gospel teaches that technical or mental experimentation cannot be admitted into the religious equation.

My friend's mind experiment reminded me of the argument that God should love homosexuals more because they do not reproduce. Gays reduce our ecological footprint by easing population pressure. And the argument that a corpse is more meritorious than the living because it never sins or harms anybody. It does no good, but also no harm. This Abdu'l-Baha called the holiness of the grave.

Maybe religious persecutors of the Chosen of God, Jesus, Muhammad, Baha'u'llah, do just what this mind experiment poses. They lie, they calumniate and kill in order to perform what they regard as a good deed. The evil surrounding it only makes their action even more meritorious. That may be so. Like anything else, we have no certain knowledge of what will happen to them in the next world. In any case, the last prayer of Jesus was "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Like the Temptation at the beginning, we have to take that seriously and forgive them, though it may make our skin crawl.

Our Qur'an quote above is about this very issue. It starts off, "Or do they say, "He is possessed?..." The holy text does not reciprocate with the riposte that no, they are the ones who are possessed. Instead, it assumes just what Jesus said, forgive them and leave them to themselves.

But it also suggests taking it a step further. We do not tempt God, but men can and must be tested. Whenever you encounter a dispute over the truth, make a more sophisticated thought experiment. Ask,

"What would the world would be like if truth were just what these true believers think it is? Would there be more order and health, or would confusion and corruption be the result?"

There are two reasons to believe in any religious teacher. One, because I know in my heart that He is Who He says He is. This is personal, private and unscientific. But there is also reason number two, I believe because I can answer "yes" to that social thought experiment. I asked if His teaching promotes health and order, and I estimated that it would. That is why I, in spite of my revulsion for religious fanatics, became a Baha'i in the first place. Here are some examples of how Baha'u'llah explicitly forbids what we are accused of, corrupting the earth.

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"We have sustained the weight of all calamities to sanctify you from all earthly corruption and ye are yet indifferent...." (Baha'u'llah, quoted in, Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, 31)

"Say: O people, cause no corruption in the earth and dispute not with men; for, verily, this is not worthy of those who have chosen in the shelter of their Lord a station which shall indeed remain secure." (Baha'u'llah, The Tablet of the Branch - from BWF)

"Follow, O people, what hath been prescribed unto you in Our Tablets, and walk not after the imaginations which the sowers of mischief have devised, they that commit wickedness and impute it to God, the Most Holy, the All-Glorious, the Most Exalted. Say: We have accepted to be tried by ills and troubles, that ye may sanctify yourselves from all earthly defilements. Why, then, refuse ye to ponder Our purpose in your hearts? ... We have sustained the weight of all calamities to sanctify you from all earthly corruption, and ye are yet indifferent." (Baha'u'llah, Gleanings, 307)

"Grieve thou not over those that have busied themselves with the things of this world, and have forgotten the remembrance of God, the Most Great. By Him Who is the Eternal Truth! The day is approaching when the wrathful anger of the Almighty will have taken hold of them. He, verily, is the Omnipotent, the All-Subduing, the Most Powerful. He shall cleanse the earth from the defilement of their corruption, and shall give it for an heritage unto such of His servants as are nigh unto Him." (Baha'u'llah, Gleanings, 208)

John Taylor

email: badijet@gmail.com
blog: http://badiblog.blogspot.com/

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